The Administrative Component in Complex Organizations*

This study examines the relationship between organizational size and the proportional size of the administrative component. The hypothesis is that organizational size is directly related to the difference between the relative sizes of the clerical and managerial components—the clerical ratio minus the managerial ratio. The data, drawn from general hospitals, show that the managerial component and organizational size are negatively related, and that organizational size and the relative size of the clerical component are not related.     

WHITE-COLLAR PROLETARIANS? THE STRUCTURE OF CLERICAL WORK AND LEVELS OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Marxist theory has long argued that the development of capitalism tends to proletarianize office employees. This article addresses the validity of this claim. Using survey data drawn from a subsample of clerical workers employed in the communications industry, the article tests a series of hypotheses regarding the relation between computerization, clerical work, and levels of class consciousness. In line with predictions of deskilling, computerization seems to heighten managerial control over workers' jobs, and to lower the conceptual content of workers' tasks as well. Alienation from work also tends to increase apace with the computerization of clerical work. Variation in the structure of workers' jobs, however, displays little or no bearing upon office workers' levels of class consciousness. In short, although the restructuring of clerical work does affect workers' attitudes toward their jobs, it does little to foster an increasingly proletarian attitude toward management. The study suggests that the structure of workers' tasks may be less consequential for the development of class consciousness than has often been presumed.     

Legitimacy,Board Involvement,and Resource Competitiveness: Drivers of NGO Revenue Diversification

Revenue diversification, which generates resources from different streams and an increased number of sources, has been highly recommended as an active strategy to maintain revenue stability. To help NGOs to strategically improve or maintain revenue diversification, we identified managerial and environmental drivers of revenue diversification. Using a national sample of 429 Chinese grassroots NGOs, we investigated the extent to which organizational legitimacy, board involvement, and resource competitiveness influence organizational revenue diversification. Our findings reveal that managerial factors, including organizational legitimacy and board involvement, could increase organizational revenue diversification in terms of the organizational revenue diversification index (HHI) and the number of revenue sources. Regarding environmental factors, regional organizational density may exert a negative influence, whereas revenue diversification could improve with increasing regional GDP.     

Locating Gender Neutrality in Formal and Informal Aspects of Organizational Cultures

This article describes and analyzes the practices that conceal gender at work in the contexts of different organizational cultures. The case studies on which I base my discussion derive from clerical work in two organizational settings. The interpretation I suggest is that regardless of their sex, age or hierarchical position at work, employees regard gender as a personal and intimate issue that, with the exception of pay, does not belong to the sphere of work. Gender issues raise questions that disturb the preferred harmony in everyday life in workplaces. Consequently, the employees seemed to think that hierarchical differences are located in society at large, not in their own workplaces. The analysis shows that age, position and technology shaped differences not only between women and men in organizations, but also among female clerical workers. Thus the results relate both to the practical realities at work and to the gender identities of clerical employees in their organizational cultures.     

Casework Job Design and Client Outcomes in Welfare-to-Work Offices

Differences in performance across different locations of a humanservice program may be driven by client, managerial, organizational,policy, or environmental characteristics. While many of thesefactors are outside the control of local managers, other factorsmay be open to influence by local discretion and may have independenteffects on performance. One issue facing local managers is howto divide job tasks among frontline staff, but little evidenceis available regarding whether job design is related to performance.In this article, I examine the relationships between differentcasework task configurations and welfare-to-work office performance.Controlling for a number of client and office characteristics,I find that clients' average earnings are higher over a two-yearperiod in offices that primarily use unified case managementand in offices with a specialist who develops job opportunities.I find no effects on earnings in offices that use other kindsof specialists and no effects of unified case management orspecialists on welfare benefit receipt in the two-year period.Overall, the findings suggest that local managerial decisionsregarding job design help explain the variation in performanceacross offices and suggest a possible lever through which performancecan be improved.     

A comprehensive work injury prevention program with clerical and office workers: phase I

The risk for the development of musculoskeletal disorders and associated conditions in clerical and office workers is well documented. The majority of work injury prevention programs for this population were single-faceted (education, workstation redesign, or task modification) and yielded both positive and negative findings. This pilot study was conducted with 16 full-time clerical and office workers at a small private college. In a randomized control trial, the intervention group received four hours of individualized training through a multi-faceted injury prevention program. Between group differences in musculoskeletal symptom frequency and intensity and perceived stress and energy levels existed, although were statistically insignificant. There was a statistically significant decrease in Lower Back ache/pain from pre to post measures for the intervention group.     

Mobile Organizing Using Information Technology (MOBIT)

Both at the corporate level and in the government sector, we are currently witnessing a transformation towards mobile organizing using information technology (MOBIT). The mobile technology wave is challenging the fundamentals on organizational thinking on four accounts: (1) organizational platforms that support productive and efficient collaboration and enable self-development, experimentation and innovative behaviour; (2) balancing the need for managerial control and action with privacy rights for the individual workers related to digital transactions and storage; (3) strategies for having workers and external users (i.e. customers, citizens) at home, in a satellite office, or at the headquarters/front office; and (4) knowledge creation, replication, adaptation, and utilization in organizations glued with IT.     

The ambivalence of the work of the hotel managers: an approach to ergonomics

This article uses the contributions of ergonomics to understand the work performed by hotel managers. The concern to understand the job of managers is something new in the ergonomics and few studies address this issue, especially in what concerns the work of hotel managers and its aspects of performance and health, which is the focus of this article. Through a literature review on the subject, it is sought to understand the managers' work activity, the impacts on their health and their organizational performance, as managers take an ambivalent position in organizations, since they have to deal directly with the demands of upper and lower hierarchies in a context of high competition, organizational changes and user requirements. It is then inferred there is a risk of increased work density for managers, bringing negative consequences to their health and organizational performance. This phenomenon, still poorly covered by ergonomics, contributes to a certain invisibility of the manager's work in society as a whole, when the manager may suffer from health problems, which are also common in certain populations of workers who do not take the managerial function.     

The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)

Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century’s old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.     

THE IMPACT OF SUPPORT RESOURCES ON LOCAL CHAPTER OPERATIONS IN THE ANTIDRUNK-DRIVING MOVEMENT

Resource mobilization is critical for the development of social movement organizations. This study evaluates the differential impact of membership support and community organization support on the goals and operations of local chapters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). It was found that membership support is associated with the programming goals of local chapters, that is, public awareness, victim assistance, and promoting antidrunk-driving legislation. Community organization support was only associated with youth education as a programming emphasis. In terms of organizational operations, membership support was associated with more central office contacts and increased contacts with other MADD chapters and more cooperative programming with the national central office of MADD. In contrast community organization support was associated with less contact and more disagreement with the central office on policies and less cooperation on programs.     

COMPARISON OF CHARACTERISTICS OF PRIVATE PRODUCT PRODUCING ORGANIZATIONS AND PUBLIC SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS

This analysis explores whether propositions and empirical findings of contemporary theories of organizations directly apply to both private product producing organizations (PPOs) and public human service organizations (PSOs). Eight central characteristics are compared: organizational values and goals, incentives, organizational structure, raw materials, power-dependency relationships, technology, revenues and accountability, and environmental constraints. Major differences between PPOs and PSOs suggest that organization theories developed from findings about PPOs inadequately describe PSOs. Comparative research would demonstrate the need for new models of these organizational types. Since these types derive from contradictory assumptions and have differing characteristics, each should be sampled to the other's exclusion and generalizations made only to that type. The findings refute the popular assumption that all PSOs can privatize with equal success This is not a failure by PSOs to achieve PPOs' standards; rather the types pursue different values and accomplish different goals.     

From management to leadership: a shift towards understanding the organizational complexity of multidisciplinary collaboration

Multidisciplinary collaboration is central to modern social welfare organizations, yet knowledge about the organizational context of collaboration is scarce. The study objective was to establish multidisciplinary collaboration by designing an organizational field study. The aim of this article is to explore managerial roles and perspectives during an organizational process of developing multidisciplinary collaboration. Eighteen management meetings, held during a two-year period, are analysed. The analysis reveals that the management gradually grasps the complexity of multidisciplinary collaboration; negotiations on the concept are ongoing while their point of view changes from distant to involved. The management takes leadership towards multidisciplinary collaboration through a series of legitimacy-related negotiations, illustrating the organizational and managerial contexts of multidisciplinary collaboration as well as introducing it as a new type of managerial task.     

STILL FEELING PROUD TO BE WORKING FOR YOUR EMPLOYER? LONGITUDINAL CHANGES IN WHITE COLLAR EMPLOYEES' MORALE IN A TIME OF ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURING

Using two panels of employer-employee matched datasets, this study investigates the changes in work morale for white-collar employees—managerial, professional, and technical (MPT) workers—and how such changes are related to organizational restructuring. Findings suggest little changes in work morale of white-collar workers—more MPT workers in the 2002 data strongly agreed that they “feel proud to be working for their employers” than did their counterparts in 1991, but fewer of them agreed to the statement. Moreover, managerial employees have been increasingly akin to the tall organizational hierarchy, but display some resentment toward teamwork. In contrast, work morale of professional/technical workers is not related to the changes in organizational hierarchy and teamwork, but their positive reaction to internal labor markets has significantly declined from 1991 to 2002. The conclusion section summarizes major findings and discusses implications for future studies on this subject.     

Leadership in education: Effective U.K. college principals

College leaders face increasing challenges to manage complex responsibilities. They must possess a wide variety of managerial and leadership skills to be successful in academic environments, which are beginning to resemble more traditional organizational frameworks. The study examined in this article explored the relationships among managerial style, organizational climate, and several measures of college‐student performance with a sample of British further education college principals (similar to U.S. community college presidents). While considering the influence of various background factors, such as the size of the college, student funding, and years of experience, several significant relationships emerged demonstrating a significant association between principals' managerial behaviors and measures of college and student performance.     

Occupational Segregation and the Tipping Phenomenon: The Contrary Case of Court Reporting in the USA

The ‘tipping’ phenomenon, whereby an occupation switches from dominance by one demographic group to dominance by another, has occurred in various occupations. Multiple causes have been suggested for such switches, including several related to technological change, both through effects on the performance of the work and through the effect of changing demand for different occupations. The court reporting occupation provides a novel setting for testing the relevance of various proposed causes for the increased feminization of many occupations. In this case, many of the general correlates, including declining wages, are not found; rather the phenomenon is related to the earlier feminization of the clerical workforce and the increased identification of court reporting with clerical work.     

Six for Lunch: A Dining Option for Residents with Dementia in a Special Care Unit

Recent research has focused on the design of special care units for residents with dementia, often identifying the social benefits of residentially scaled kitchen and dining areas. This qualitative case study examines how the environmental design features of two dining settings in one special care unit impact residents’ patterns of socialization and interaction at meal times. The first setting is a central dining room for 50 to 60 residents. The second setting is a small office with a residentially scaled kitchen, where once a week, the activity director invites six residents for lunch once a week. Within an ecological theoretical framework, the study findings reveal that, while mealtimes in both settings are highly anticipated, it is the complex relational ties between the operational, managerial, and environmental features of the settings which determine residents’ social interaction and satisfaction with their mealtime experiences.     

Transportation of Older People in a Rural Community

Abstract

This paper documents changes over the period 1982 to 1997 in the risks and costs of involuntary job loss among different occupational groups. Using data from the Displaced Workers Surveys, it shows that the rate of job loss increased among white-collar workers. This increased displacement risk results from the growing proportion of jobs lost because positions or shifts were abolished, a reason that likely captures the much-publicized effects of corporate restructuring. The evidence regarding occupational shifts in the costs of job loss is mixed: The reemployment rates of all occupational groups rose during the recent economic expansion, and the reemployment chances of those displaced from professional and managerial jobs remained comparatively high. However, the post-displacement wage losses of managerial employees have increased both over time and relative to those of other occupational groups. The increase in the proportionate wage loss of this occupational group is not explained by compositional effects and may be the result of organizational change.     

The Socioeconomic Basis of Farm Enterprise Diversification Decisions1

Abstract In contrast to earlier studies, recent research on socioeconomic and ecological factors affecting farm decision making suggests that, at the microlevel, farm size is inversely related to specialization and directly related to diversification decisions but empirical tests have been limited. Using a social behavioral, farming systems perspective, we examine factors affecting diversification and specialization decisions, including land tenure, off-farm work, and education (which are crucial to successful management) and environmental variation (which affects the decision to select appropriate enterprises). Data from a random sample of Kentucky farmers were used to test the model. Diversification, whether defined according to crops or commodities, is significantly related to farm size, human capital, and regional variation in land and soil types. The study clarifies the relationship between diversification and farm size issues and broadens understanding of farm diversification decisions. The findings indicate that increased farm size and better farm management reduce the rate of increase in farm specialization.     

A new era in Australian migration policy

The discussion traces the evolution of Australian migration policy since 1975, arguing that the primary factor shaping policy has been interparty competition for influence within Australia's ethnic communities. Since late 1975 when the Liberal/National Country Party (LibNCP) Conservative Government returned to power, Australian immigration policy has moved in different directions from the previous post World War II experience. The demographic implications have been profound. In 1975 the LibNCP government returned to office committed to restoring an active migration program. By 1980-81 it had largely succeeded in this numerical goal. Australia's migration growth rate at .82% of the total population exceeded almost all other Western society. What was new, in comparison to previous policy, was the migrant selection system and source countries. By the time the government lost office in March 1983, family reunion had become the major migration program souce and Asia was rapidly becoming the dominant place of migrant origin. This emphasis on family reunion was not intended by government immigration planners but was a product of domestic political change and resultant new influences over migration policy. As to the increasing Asian component, it has mainly been an unintended consequence of the expansion in the family reunion program. Although the liberalization of family reunion eligibility has largely been designed to appease the major Southern European ethnic communities, few applications have been forthcoming from these countries. Asian applicants have been numerous. Labor government policy since March 1983 has shown remarkable continuity with that of the LibNCP both in its selection system and in the size of the migrant intake. The motivation for the commitment to immigration derived first from longstanding traditions within the Australian business community that Australia's economic growth and dynamism depended on rapid population growth. More specifically there remained a group of businesses whose fortunes seemed directly tied up with population growth, including those in the housing industry and manufacturers dependent on tariff protected growth in Australia's home market. This group has constituted the most vocal business pressure goups behind migrant intakes throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. At first the migrant intake was increased cautiously. The 1st major move toward expansion came with the introduction of the selection system in January 1979. This substantially liberalized entry for independent applicants by reducing the relative significance of scarce occupational skills and increasing that for other migrant qualities, including skill attainment, competence in English, and other qualities likely to favor the prospective migrant in his/her search for a job and in assimilating readily with Australian society.